Dr Gareth Goodier, chief executive of Cambridge University Hospitals foundation trust, has said that the organisation has secured savings equivalent to more than 25% of its bed capacity through the use of specialist software which exposes performance data for individual wards and employees.

He said that the software has led to a cultural shift among staff, adding an element of competitiveness. "The hope is that the team is driven to improve performance by having, if you like, the shame of having the wrong numbers up there," Goodier told Guardian Healthcare, adding that if other trusts adopted this approach to managing and sharing volumes of data, the NHS might save £5bn over five years.

The trust, which runs Addenbrooke's hospital in Cambridge with around 1,000 beds, started using Qlikview's business discovery tool four years ago, allowing it to view all its major performance measures. The system pulls in data from multiple data sources and then displays relevant information to staff in a read only format.

Goodier and his staff are able to look at how the trust is performing in different areas and can examine individual staff performance and patient satisfaction. With more than 7,000 employees, he said that it was important to be able to see everything clearly. The level of access that staff have to the business intelligence system depends on their role and what information they need to view as part of their job.

It took around 18 months for clinicians to feel fully comfortable with the system and completely trust the data, he said, but added that this apprehension was to be expected as the system is so open and transparent and allows staff to see their peers' performance.

Describing what life was like when the trust used a paperless system, he said: "Well you have wads of paperwork and frankly you just never got into this level [of information that we have now], you just couldn't.

"With this system you can tease out which ward, which leader of that ward, which consultant. So before it was much less instant, and it was a bit like flying blind because you just don't know where the improvements are."

Goodier acknowledged that it is not the system itself that has made the improvements at Cambridge, but how it has been used.

"It highlights where you should put the effort to try and drill down and focus so there's a whole pile of work that goes on in the improvement area. But it would be difficult to do this without the information presented visually and clearly and with that level of granularity," he said.